this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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UK Rail and Trains
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Eurostar suddenly decides it does plan to expand after ruling outlining if they don't they will have to provide space in the depot for a rival.
They say in the 2030s - that could 14 years away compared with the rival consortium who said by 2029
With the number of different proposals now in flight (at least 5 that I'm aware of, including this one), surely we must be heading towards the conclusion that we need to build new depots. If unmet demand for international rail travel is there and the only limiting factor is capacity at Temple Mills, surely the answer has to be increasing capacity to meet the demand rather than just accepting that some company will be allowed a few scraps.
I agree and its strange its not been mentioned at all. It seems odd to me given how much capacity there is unused in the tunnel itself that the warehousing wasn't built to an equivalent spec. Its possible it was planned for depots to be on the onward HS routes that never happened (i.e. HS2 via the HS1-HS2 link).
It would be a small amount of money when compared to road building budgets but car brain dominates DfT (and Treasury) thinking.
Exactly! Tunnel capacity is a hard upper limit, but in an ideal world you'd be using every minute of that capacity for either passengers or freight. Depot capacity issues are very solvable.
Station capacity is also an issue (particularly passport control issues at St Pancras, which limits how many passengers they can process even beyond platform capacity), but that's relatively solvable too. One of the competing proposals (possibly the Gemini one?) wanted to make Stratford International its terminus rather than St Pancras to avoid station congestion. If HS1-HS2 link were back in play, that would open up other options for alternative termini too (such as Old Oak Common, or HS2 stations out of London).